Mike Niehuser: And how soon do you think you’ll see product coming out of Marion facility?
Mark Jensen : Lithium carbonate, we produce lithium carbonate every day now. So as Mark mentioned, during the call, you have to go through the trial and getting through the qualification process and I think we’re in the qualification process with 7 different companies today, maybe more, that we ship them samples of lithium carbonate starting off like grams, then it goes to kilograms, and then it goes to tons. And obviously, now over the course of the next short period of time, we will — we’re actually starting to sell that product to one of our groups, and we’ll be selling it to a few others. And obviously, on the rare earth side, as we start to expand, we’ve announced a contract with USA Rare Earth. It’s been a great collaborative partnership.
We have partnerships with AML, a phenomenal company. One of the coolest magnet companies I’ve ever have been, working in this industry for a long time now, and their technology is absolutely phenomenal for producing magnet. Great — check them out. I’m on the Board of the company. We’re an investor in the company as well. So extremely excited about them. But we’ll start — we produce lithium carbonate every day. Our goal is when we get Certificate of Occupancy in Marion is to start working on the magnet lines there for recycling end-of-life magnets and preprocessing those magnets and then start turning those into oxide as well.
Mike Niehuser: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: And our next question comes from Steve Segal with KBB Asset Management. Please state your question.
Steve Segal: Hey Mark, how are you? Great job on getting all this stuff done. But you got you and your team. I was just wondering — I had two questions. One is on the spin-off of carbon, will Wyoming be part of that? And then — okay, I guess that’s the question.
Mark Jensen : Yes. So Wyoming will be part — so Wyoming County will be part of it. So let me — when we spin-off Carbon, it’s spinning off the American Carbon Complex. With that also comes the ability to produce concentrate. So where Ramaco announced that they have billions of dollars’ worth of rare earths in Wyoming, the state, I guess, we and they would have the same amount of rare earth in Kentucky and West Virginia. And we can spend money on research reports and all that stuff. But what comes with the American Carbon Complex is one, obviously, the Met Coal division, the iron ore platform that we bought, we’re working on another acquisition as we speak around the infrastructure marketplace. And we have a couple of mining assets in West Virginia, we’re working on as well that we can post-spin-off can look at on the acquisition front, but also comes with about the rare earth concentration side.
So as we produce met carbon, the waste material, the iron ore come out of that, the rare earth element in it. So we’ll look to also extract that as well, which is part of the initial phase of that is Wyoming County and West Virginia.
Steve Segal: Okay, understand. Thank you for explaining that. And then the bond that you announced today for that facility that could be on the ReElement side correct?
Mark Jensen : Yes. So that’s ReElement. That’s refining lithium ores from international sources. So predominantly from Africa, working on a partnership in Australia as well as in Canada. The byproduct that comes out of that actually goes into the ceramic industry. So there’s really not a whole lot of waste that will come around there. But that’s part of ReElement. That’s being built on our Knott County Complex. So we have a complex there has about $3.5 million of reclamation liability sitting on the American Carbon platform that we’ve assigned to ReElement that will be cleaned up here. Those bonds will be removed, less liability for Carbon, better platform for ReElement and phenomenal workforce in those how to process commodities.
I mean our team and people we’ve been employing since in the region since 2015, ’16, they know how to process commodities better than anybody in the world, and we’re going to give them a long-term stable opportunity for employment to stay in their community.
Steve Segal: Right. And that’s not — is that breaking as coal, right?
Mark Jensen : I mean it’s a less — it’s less environmentally harsh process in coal. It’s more contained inside of a warehouse, there’s no water discharge, we produce cleaner water than what comes into our system. So I mean, it just — it gives them a really good working environment and lets people and their communities stay in their community. I mean, that community is a disaster right now. I mean Knott County is in rough shape. They have no businesses going there. Corruption is at highest levels, so we’re going to help them.
Steve Segal: Is that from flooding?
Mark Jensen : Just in general. No, from lack of a development. Lack of — the judge executive there has done a phenomenal job to recruit us, they bring us in. But the rest of the community has nothing going for it. And so we’re exciting and — but there’s a phenomenal workforce there, but they leave the area to work every day. So we’re excited about helping bring a business there that can provide jobs there and start reducing some of the corruption that takes place there.
